Britain & the British Seas

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...the south-eastern counties were originally organised as separate kingdoms, and were only subsequently reduced by conquest to the status of counties, the western group, with the Fig. Ioo.--The Southern Counties of England as originated on the open high grounds emergent from the forested lowlands. exception of Cornwall, arose as a federal kingdom with Winchester for its capital. The Thames is unique among the greater English rivers in being a boundary between counties almost from its source to its mouth, whereas the Yorkshire Ouse, the Trent, the Great Ouse, and the Severn intersect the counties of their basins. This exceptional frontier is a monument of the time when a fortified London denied the Thames road to the Anglo-Saxons, who elsewhere advanced up the streams and up their tributaries, placing their boundaries rather on the water-partings than along the water-ways. London compelled the West Saxons to march overland from the south, and so led them to treat the river as a bulwark, which they crossed only for a definite step of fresh colonisation in what are now the shires of Oxford and Buckingham. They traversed the open country in yet two other directions, eastward to Surrey, and north-westward across the Cotswolds to the valley of the Severn, where a sub-tribe, the Hwiccas, founded the three settlements of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. But the northern and northwestern territories of Wessex were subsequently lost to the Mercians, and the Thames became the permanent boundary (Fig. 99.) The Anglian settlements north of the Tees were founded on a remote shore, but the great body of the Angle warriors pushed up the Humber, and up the rivers of the Wash system, to become neighbours of the Saxon, and to be involved in the history of the English plain....